Archive for March, 2013

For the second year in a row, I’ll be spending Easter in Santa Rosa de Copán in Honduras. This year, I’m leading a large team of 19 individuals who will be spending a week working with Habitat Honduras to continue building homes that we started last year in the 31-house El Rosario project.

I’m excited this year that my daughter and wife will be joining me and also three board members from Habitat Wake: Steve McCulloch, Carolyn Baxter, and Delores Parker. We also have four of our Americorps members on the team: Dre Antono, Sarah Edwards, Nancy Hawk, and Matt Bailer. All told with this trip (our 3rd), we’ll have had 40 folks from Wake County take part in the life-changing work of Habitat Honduras. We have some other regular construction volunteers and some super committee volunteers joining us as well. We are aged 16 to 60+ and one of us even travels on a French passport.

This year, through our “tithe” to Habitat International, we’ll fund the construction of 30 homes in Honduras—one for each home we build in Wake. The cost of a Habitat Honduras home is $4,500, but I can assure you that the difference that home makes for a Honduran family is much greater than the difference experienced for Habitat Wake families. The poverty is just so extreme, that a 450 square foot adobe brick home with concrete floor and tin roof is seen as a gift from God—something that the Honduran families never expected to achieve.

Happy Easter to all of you! Please keep our team in your prayers for travelling mercies and for open eyes and hearts as we serve next week in Honduras. Look for blog updates from team members throughout the week.

…broken for you. We shared these words on a building site this past Sunday as members of Christ Episcopal Church and Highland United Methodist Church gathered for a “Framing Frenzy” event. For the first time in my 25 years at Habitat, I was part of a Holy Communion celebration on a building site. And how appropriate! Starting Saturday morning and finishing mid-day Monday, members of these churches gathered in partnership with Ty and her family to build a home that is the answer to Ty’s prayers. By noon Monday, the home was totally complete on the exterior! Work will continue on the interior over the next couple months when Ty will be able to realize her dream of owning a home of her own.

The Body of Christ came together in East Raleigh and left some tangible evidence of God’s love behind. Practical and tangible evidence. Amen.

We are in the Christian season of Lent. The 40 days prior to Easter. We think of Lent as a season where we give up something important to us in order to place our focus more intently on God. In our Christian tradition, Jesus gave up his life to pardon all of our sins. I have to ask myself what can I sacrifice in my life that others might be able to experience God’s love in their life?

At Habitat, we see this sacrifice all the time, all year around. People give up their free time to volunteer, people give up their resources to help fund our important work. And through it all they are able to proclaim that through all of their “loss”, they gain more than they give.

In worship this past Sunday, we sang a song very familiar to my Baptist upbringing, The Wonderful Cross. These lyrics have stayed with me and provided for a daily meditation since: